This is the wrap-up for our (planned) posts for the Picasso series. We hope you learned new things throughout the series. Our goal was to save you time by not having to figure out details on your own and thus get a jump start to an amazing library.
It's always a good exercise for our brains to review the things you've learned and solidify the knowledge. Our blog posts still will be up in the future, so feel free to bookmark them for future reference, but make sure to go through this post and verify that you understand each part of Picasso's functionality.
Picasso Series
In the last few weeks we worked through a few various features of the Picasso library. Let's summarize our posts by topic.
Image Loading
First of all, we've showed you how to load images from various sources. The standard use case for Picasso is loading images from an Internet source, but it's not the only option.
Displaying Images
Loading the images is only the first step. After you've the image data, you need to display it to the user. In multiple posts we've shown you how to optimize the image loading in adapters and how to use placeholders. Lastly, there often is a need to change the image size and scaling to optimize the display of images.
- Adapter Use (ListView, GridView, …)
- Placeholders, Errors and Fading
- Image Resizing, Scaling and fit()
Advanced Loading & Optimizations
Most developer's knowledge ends at the point of loading images and displaying them in a beautiful way. However, Picasso's functionality goes way further! We cover these advanced topics in separate blog posts. Even if you don't see a need for it right now, give it a read to make sure you're aware of these features, if you run into a use case where Picasso can be incredibly helpful.
- Ordering Requests by Image Priority
- Request Management by Grouping of Images via Tag()
- Callbacks, RemoteViews and Notifications
- Image Rotation and Transformation
Caches Are Critical
A critical component of image loading are the caches: memory and disk cache. Making sure that the caches are working as intended is an important part of developing an app with heavy use of images. Picasso makes it very easy to analyze the effectiveness of the caches. We show you how to analyze and experiment with the caches to optimize your app's quality.
Customizing Picasso
Picasso is quite amazing. It not just provides you with a ton of features, it also let's you modify core components. In our last two blog posts we go deep into Picasso and change kernel parts of Picasso.
Closing Words
First of all, we'd like to thank Square for an amazing library, which makes the life of every Android developer so much better.
Second, we hope that you learned a lot throughout this series. We attempted to give you a comprehensive introduction into Picasso. Please, let us know if it helped you out. Let us know if we missed something or you'd like a more detailed look at a topic!
Thirdly, for now we don't have any plans for more Picasso blog posts. However, we'll update you if Picasso gets a significant update. Since the Picasso series was such a success, we're also thinking about doing another series about another amazing image loading library named Glide. If you're interested in Glide, let us know in the comments!
